The state of climate science: ‘fluxed up’

The title is my twist on what Dr. Judith Curry said in an email to David Rose in his latest article about the upcoming IPCC AR5 report:

Last night Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the leaked summary showed that ‘the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux’.

She goes on to say:

She said it therefore made no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in its forecasts and conclusions has increased.

For example, in the new report, the IPCC says it is ‘extremely likely’ – 95 per cent certain – that human influence caused more than half the temperature rises from 1951 to 2010, up from ‘very confident’ – 90 per cent certain – in 2007.

Prof Curry said: ‘This is incomprehensible to me’ – adding that the IPCC projections are ‘overconfident’, especially given the report’s admitted areas of doubt.

Professor Myles Allen also got in a few licks, Prof Allen said:

‘The idea of producing a document of near-biblical infallibility is a misrepresentation of how science works, and we need to look very carefully about what the IPCC does in future.’

Rose also took Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham to task at the Guardian over ugly death threat type comments that remain about their rebuttal to his article last week, while other comments are removed for not meeting “standards”.

BTW, Rose is Jewish.

And finally, he calls out Bob Ward, but unfortunately doesn’t mention his past as a punk rocker before he became a climate activist:

Another assault was mounted by Bob Ward, spokesman for the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at the London School of Economics.

Mr Ward tweeted that the article was ‘error-strewn’.

The eminent US expert Professor Judith Curry, who unlike Mr Ward is a climate scientist with a long list of peer-reviewed publications to her name, disagreed.

On her blog Climate Etc she defended The Mail on Sunday, saying the article contained ‘good material’, and issued a tweet which challenged Mr Ward to say what these ‘errors’ were.

He has yet to reply.

As for the state of climate science, this summary by Rose of the IPCC situation is worth sharing:

‘A REFLECTION OF EVIDENCE FROM NEW STUDIES’… THE IPCC CHANGES ITS STORY

What they say: ‘The rate of warming since 1951 [has been] 0.12C per decade.’

What this means: In their last hugely influential report in 2007, the IPCC claimed the world was warming at 0.2C per decade. Here they admit there has been a massive cut in the speed of global warming – although it’s buried in a section on the recent warming ‘pause’. The true figure, it now turns out, is not only just over half what they thought – it’s below their lowest previous estimate.

What they say: ‘Surface temperature reconstructions show multi-decadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950-1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th Century.’

What this means: As recently as October 2012, in an earlier draft of this report, the IPCC was adamant that the world is warmer than at any time for at least 1,300 years. Their new inclusion of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ – long before the Industrial Revolution and its associated fossil fuel burning – is a concession that its earlier statement is highly questionable.

What they say: ‘Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10 – 15 years.’

What this means: The ‘models’ are computer forecasts, which the IPCC admits failed to ‘see… a reduction in the warming trend’. In fact, there has been no statistically significant warming at all for almost 17 years – as first reported by this newspaper last October, when the Met Office tried to deny this ‘pause’ existed.In its 2012 draft, the IPCC didn’t mention it either. Now it not only accepts it is real, it admits that its climate models totally failed to predict it.

What they say: ‘There is medium confidence that this difference between models and observations is to a substantial degree caused by unpredictable climate variability, with possible contributions from inadequacies in the solar, volcanic, and aerosol forcings used by the models and, in some models, from too strong a response to increasing greenhouse-gas forcing.’

What this means: The IPCC knows the pause is real, but has no idea what is causing it. It could be natural climate variability, the sun, volcanoes – and crucially, that the computers have been allowed to give too much weight to the effect carbon dioxide emissions (greenhouse gases) have on temperature change.

What they say: ‘Climate models now include more cloud and aerosol processes, but there remains low confidence in the representation and quantification of these processes in models.’

What this means: Its models don’t accurately forecast the impact of fundamental aspects of the atmosphere – clouds, smoke and dust.

What they say: ‘Most models simulate a small decreasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent, in contrast to the small increasing trend in observations… There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the small observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent.’

What this means: The models said Antarctic ice would decrease. It’s actually increased, and the IPCC doesn’t know why.

What they say: ‘ECS is likely in the range 1.5C to 4.5C… The lower limit of the assessed likely range is thus less than the 2C in the [2007 report], reflecting the evidence from new studies.’

What this means: ECS – ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ – is an estimate of how much the world will warm every time carbon dioxide levels double. A high value means we’re heading for disaster. Many recent studies say that previous IPCC claims, derived from the computer models, have been way too high. It looks as if they’re starting to take notice, and so are scaling down their estimate for the first time.

Rose also mentions the new paper from Nic Lewis taking the Met office climate model to task for having an ECS of 4.6C, which is greater than even the IPCC is claiming:

Lewis’s paper is scathing about the ‘future warming’ document issued by the Met Office in July, which purported to explain why the current 16-year global warming ‘pause’ is unimportant, and does not mean the ECS is lower than previously thought.

Lewis says the document made misleading claims about other scientists’ work – for example, misrepresenting important details of a study by a team that included Lewis and 14 other IPCC experts. The team’s paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience in May, said the best estimate of the ECS was 2C or less – well under half the Met Office estimate.

He also gives evidence that another key Met Office model is inherently skewed. The result is that it will always produce high values for CO2-induced warming, no matter how its control knobs are tweaked, because its computation of the cooling effect of smoke and dust pollution – what scientists call ‘aerosol forcing’ – is simply incompatible with the real world.

This has serious implications, because the Met Office’s HadCM3 model is used to determine the Government’s climate projections, which influence policy.

Mr Lewis concludes that the Met Office modelling is ‘fundamentally unsatisfactory, because it effectively rules out from the start the possibility that both aerosol forcing and climate sensitivity are modest’. Yet this, he writes, ‘is the combination that recent observations support’.

79 thoughts on “The state of climate science: ‘fluxed up’”

governments only look at one section, the Guide to Policy Makers, of the report and that is written by some politician not any scientist. It contains what governments want to hear not what they should hear, BIG BIG difference.

She said it therefore made no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in its forecasts and conclusions has increased….

I have said before that it’s amazing that in the face of a 16+ years temperature standstill, failure of the climate models and a flood of climate sensitivity reducing papers that the IPCC is even more confident! In what other scientific field would you see this? The answer is simple: The IPCC has been infiltrated by numerous advocacy groups and ’cause’ campaigning climate scientists.

As predicted by myself and others, the failed hypothesis will NOT fade away quietly into the night. It will be fought over, tooth and nail. Every last little nit will have to be dragged into the light of day for all to see. Every failed projection, every prediction of CO2 “fingerprint” that has simply not appeared, every idiotic doom-laden prediction. They will continue to deny what is right in front of them, while calling us the d-word.

Oh, and, people with facts on their side do NOT fight so strongly to protect their worldview. People who have been lying for years do. People who knew their hypothesis was invalidated years ago do. People who invested their inheritance on bird-slicing…. er…. wind farms do. People who know the jig is up will deny it to the end. Watch an episode of Cops. See the suspect get frisked. See the office take the coke from the suspect. See the suspect INSIST that coke was not on him.

The similarities between Baghdad Bob (aka Comical Ali), The Black Knight from “Holy Grail”, and AGW believers are astounding.

Hey – Antarctic ice is increasing.
“No ’tisn’t”
Hey, no temperature increase in almost 17 years.
“‘Tis but a scratch!”
It’s not now warmer than during the Medieval Warm Period.
“It’s only a flesh wound”
Hey, sensitivity isn’t even HALF your lowest estimate.
“We butchered the force present at the airport. We have retaken the airport! There are no Americans there!”

It is evident that Europe experienced, on the whole, relatively mild climate conditions during the earliest centuries of the second millennium (i.e., the early Medieval period). Agriculture was possible at higher latitudes (and higher elevations in the mountains) than is currently possible in many regions, and there are numerous anecdotal reports of especially bountiful harvests (e.g., documented yields of grain) throughout Europe during this interval of time. Grapes were grown in England several hundred kilometers north of their current limits of growth, and subtropical flora such as fig trees and olive trees grew in regions of Europe (northern Italy and parts of Germany) well north of their current range. Geological evidence indicates that mountain glaciers throughout Europe retreated substantially at this time, relative to the glacial advances of later centuries (Grove and Switsur, 1994). A host of historical documentary proxy information such as records of frost dates, freezing of water bodies, duration of snowcover, and phenological evidence (e.g., the dates of flowering of plants) indicates that severe winters were less frequent and less extreme at times during the period from about 900 – 1300 AD in central Europe……………………

Some of the most dramatic evidence for Medieval warmth has been argued to come from Iceland and Greenland (see Ogilvie, 1991). In Greenland, the Norse settlers, arriving around AD 1000, maintained a settlement, raising dairy cattle and sheep. Greenland existed, in effect, as a thriving European colony for several centuries. While a deteriorating climate and the onset of the Little Ice Age are broadly blamed for the demise of these settlements around AD 1400,http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/medclimopt.pdf

What they say: ‘Most models simulate a small decreasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent, in contrast to the small increasing trend in observations… There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the small observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent.’

As for the Met Office I only have pity. This year they held a crisis meeting about their crappy forecasts. This year they told us to expect wetter summers just before the UK enjoyed a barbecue summer. Previously they told the UK to expect a barbecue summer just before a damp washout. The Met Office should be privatized, closed down or they should stick to the weather (7 days only) and not the climate.

It should have become apparent to the warmists a long time ago that every time they exaggerate the likely outcome of any future warming, the harder it becomes to explain away the differences between their predictions and reality. They must be totally oblivious to the ridicule that awaits them.

Never mind the ridicule – it’ll be the physical pain and suffering that’ll hurt the most – at least, if I had my way !
Seriously, although the general greeny type alarmists deserve some pain – my REAL anger is still reserved for the so called scientists that allowed this scam to go this far. Any of the scientists that have written peer reviewed papers extoling AGW without genuine scientific merit should be totally disbarred from any kind of scientific based post, and preferably put up against a post with a blind fold! They have NO excuse! Whatever their reasons, motivations, etc – the bad science perveyors must be tried and sentenced – they have thrown the scientific method out of the window and lead the whole world down a wrong and painful path. This is completely unacceptable and something I hope real scientists will also feel very very angry about, as it has created a level of mistrust never seen before…..

The claim of .12C/decade does not match the graph shown in The Mail article. Since we know there was no warming (cooling, in fact) prior to 1980, and the graph shows only .4C of warming after 1980, how can they make that claim? The actual warming over the entire 60 years is more like .05C/decade. Now, I suppose they could be claiming other factors (like aerosols) accounted for some cooling which raised the CO2 warming. Otherwise it makes no sense at all.

Given that China and India have not seen any cooling in the last 20 years the entire idea that aerosols create cooling has been falsified. I can’t see where they could get away with making such a claim.

The developments over the past year, and especially those in the last few months, should at least allow those scientists who knew they were wrong, those who played with the numbers to stay in the game, to start being more objective about the whole thing.

Perhaps it will even take away some of the power of the bullies out there which have policed everyone to the tow the party line over the years.

And it should result in less public support for green energy and CO2 reduction schemes/taxes. It doesn’t take too many headlines as in “warming half of expected, scientist admit” before people take notice.

Just trying to be more positive about this since many of us have been waiting for this for a decade.

What this means is that like wind turbine and solar speculators the very poor are supporting an every growing bank of over educated halfwits so indulged in irrelevant minutiae that they cant tell chalk from cheese. If the cost of abating 1 degree C is $3.2 quadrillion but we have no credible method of identifying whether Co2 is the anti Christ or not and that if the speculated Armageddon remains light years away then surely there must be a more positive pursuit in life than this self indulgent form of idiotic navel gazing. What is the positive purpose of spending billions to pursue a problem for which there is no solution other than mass extermination which presumably even the IPCC would consider a tiny bit extremist but I suppose it is all about bank accounts at the end of the day and right now Al Gore is the gold medal winner, clear proof that bullshit baffles brains!

Our daily media news is filled with examples of experts and public officials who have made major errors in fact or judgment but continue to deny their fault despite the existence clear facts to the contrary .Attempts to cover up their error gets them into even deeper trouble . The ones that successfully deal with mistakes are the ones who acknowledge their mistake quickly and publically and go on to do better things having learned from the past experience . Science is built on countless past errors and experimentation until the next level of understanding is achieved especially if the science is complex involving many fields or the science is relatively young still.. Science is always in a state of flux and is never settled. It is a pity that the Agw scientists and IPCC never learned from their scientific ancestors . I detect an aura of scientific arrogance and claim of superior expertise which sometime comes from attempting to force unproven science from top down instead of developing the correct science from bottom up which is the normal route . Any one who claims that their science is settled or that they are 95% certain that humans are responsible for the majority of recent warming since 1950 is clearly not a competent scientist. No mature or competent scientist would ever express such rubbish. This entire IPCC experiment continues to be a scientific problem of major proportions until the scientific community steps in to fix it.

Anthony: “It is looking like my single word quote in Rolling Stone “stillborn”, will be accurate.”

Looking at the bright side, Anthony? Good for you! Who knows? Your Rolling-Stone-distilled quote might yet end up on the cover of a magazine featuring the IPCC’s AR5, maybe even with your pic? Seriously.

BBould
You said
” IPCC is simply doing what is said what it would do”
That is where the problem probably started . Their charter or principles governing their work was to study only ” human induced ” climate change . That is like directing the justice department to only investigate and take testimony of one potential criminal when the real culprit is not known at all up front . Only major injustice can come of this approach and the wrong conclusions would be arrived at .The IPCC directive was a predirected scientific study when there was no basis of prior science knowledge to know that human induced science was the cause of climate change . So their entire prime focus was on human induced climate change , rather than studying all causes with equal vigor.Subsequently outside of IPCC organization it has become evident that there could be other prime factors which may dwarf man induced climate change .

THe epa has forced states into adapting a “stretch code” for home building. They state it is necassary to combat “global warming”. Walls now need to have an r-value of 20.0 it previously was r -15. windows have an r-value of 3. Can anyone figure if there is any savings considering
Most heat will be lost through the windows?

Edcaryl: my spotty memory recalls that Mann had a graph projecting climate change if Man contributed no CO2 to the atmosphere. This, of course would be the same result if the climate had no sensitivity to the gas. I have not seen a side-by-side comparison of this projection to the actual results of the past sixteen years, but I would bet that it is closer than any of the other model runs.

Hey johnny pics, homes that are insulated too much need to have some sort of heat exchanger to replace stale room air with outside fresh air. “Superinsulated” houses are designed with this in mind, and it costs quite a bit extra to build this way. These types of houses typically have very small windows to limit heat loss. A very tightly built house could cause health problems for occupants if it is not designed correctly. I doubt the EPA is too concerned about this, though, since they could care less about us poor, dumb taxpayers.

What they say: ‘The rate of warming since 1951 [has been] 0.12C per decade.’

What this means: In their last hugely influential report in 2007, the IPCC claimed the world was warming at 0.2C per decade. Here they admit there has been a massive cut in the [estimated] speed of global warming – although it’s buried in a section on the recent warming ‘pause’. The true figure, it now turns out, is not only just over half what they thought [0.2 C/ decade]– it’s below their lowest previous estimate. [what value was the lowest estimate]

Which, by the way, was published with a 90% confidence!
(Or so they wanted us to think.)

Willis – I still cannot get my head around some of this terminology. As I see it:

Forcing = a medium that returns energy to the surface, that would otherwise be lost to space.

Feedback = a VARIABLE medium that either returns energy to the surface or prevents it getting there in the first place.

Governor = a VARIABLE medium that either returns energy to the surface or prevents it getting there in the first place – but one that tends to return the system to the status quo (like any governor on an engine would).

I want to raise something pointing out to me by one of the Expert Reviewers. I would not have noticed myself because it is so subtle.

AR4 says 90% confidence in what, exactly? That AG emissions are responsible for “most” of the recent warming. Yes or no? Based on their previous works we know this really means “nearly all”.

AR5 says 95% confidence in what, exactly? That AG emissions are responsible for ‘more than half” of recent warming. Yes or no? This is a very big change in the claim. It must not go unnoticed when discussing the “rise in confidence”.

First, is this Expert Reviewer’s observation true?

If so, this affects how we discuss the confidence issue, and it is an issue. As Willis has pointed out, a drop in the ECS to old values is a big drop in confidence and he could probably put a number on it. The change in the claim from “most” to “>half”, i.e. as little as 51%, implies a similar drop in confidence that they know what the impact of all AG emissions are.

We may know intuitively that the confidence numbers are baseless but we can know for a fact that the claims are unequal.

…I think it was the scientists themselves, and not their computers, who did all of the exaggerating!

The speed with which the CAGW argument is unraveling is just breathtaking, but these folks have powerful friends. We’ll know CAGW is headed for the ash-heap of history when governments start to change and/or dump their “carbon control” strategies, i.e. Oz carbon tax (headed out), emissions controls, alternative energy mandates etc.

Rogerknights
You said
“Implicit in their remit was the direction to study all factors affecting climate change, since only then could the human contribution be teased out.”

The scope of such a complex study can’t be just implicit . It has to be clearly spelled out .I think it is clearly stated that they wanted “the basis of risk of human induced climate change” as you see below . Otherwise one would state that they wanted to know the risk assocaited with all factors involved in climate change , but it does not say that . Why only human induced climate change? . In my opinion , the powers in charge perhaps wrongly prejudged the prime cause of climate change as human only. It now appears that the highest risk is not human induced climate change at all but possibly other factors . It was the scientists outside of IPCC who perhaps ” teased “out these other factors as they were under no mandate to look at human induced issues primarly.Anyway that is my take on it . Others may see it differently

Here is what I understand their mandate was

The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.

The IPCC is between a rock and a hard place. According to the Daily Mail article, “governments have tabled 1,800 questions and are demanding major revisions”. The IPCC can wave these away, issue the report as scheduled, and find themselves defunded by Christmas. Or they can take them on board – in which case the report will not see the light until at least next Christmas. Doubtless some of those 1800 questions have been purposefully crafted to occasion the maximum of consternation and delay (and then there is Donna Laframboise and her Team(tm) to pick over the bona fides afterwards).

Nippy says:
September 15, 2013 at 11:55 am
“A state of flux” ?
Maybe “A state of fear”
++++++++++++
Bingo:
“A State of Fear” was the science fiction book that led me to be sceptical.
“An Inconvenient Truth” was a science fiction movie that led me to feel lied to.
“WUWT” is the greatest website in the world, and has given me great hope that Truth could be found. Anthony, the Mods and contributors should get some great recognition.

That people could watch the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and be swayed into believing man is causing Catastrophic Global Warming is downright frightening to me. It gives me great sadness to know that so many people are/were gullible enough to so easily be willing to go down the path of self destruction –all while thinking their are doing good.

CodeTech hits the nail on the head. The “denial” of the future will be that of the prior alarmists, reduced to “yeah, but it’s riddled with spelling mistakes” in an attempt to discredit. Hamsters and elderberries will be next.

In the meantime, I’m waiting with ‘bated breath for responses from Bob “The Attack Puppy” Ward and from Dana “Bad Motor Scooter” Nuccitelli. I shall ignore Mann, as he’s like a stuck record.

Do the guilty verdicts for the scientists who failed to predict the L’Aquila quake set any precedents for the alarmists who have lied and deceived in order to keep the AGW bandwagon on the road? As the story unravels this question needs to be asked.

At the time I remember thinking that the verdicts were bizarre, but now I’m not so sure. The acts of the alarmists are despicable and have resulted in the misdirection of valuable resources and probably unnecessary deaths. They should be put on trial if only to rescue the scientific principle.

I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. I know that some of you said the movie “The Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore could be wrong or right. We sort of have no proof on if we (humans) are causing it or its just nature because of evolution? I do hope we can stop global warming because it gets worse, but how bad is it now? 1-10? I say its a 5 because we are using a lot of gas, and other chemicals in the air that we don’t know of. I want to say that we have to wait for a couple of years to see a bigger difference.

The IPCC is simply doing what is said it would do, what’s the big deal?”

I missed that IPCC statement where they said they’d lie, fabricate false language to spin their favorite fantasies, insist man’s influence is evil and eventually causes world disaster, edit out the good science put forward, and a number of additional unsavory actions.

Being as that is the IPCC actions in spinning a false summary, where and when did the IPCC actually state those intentions?

The big deal is that the IPCC is wasting huge amounts of money our money. The IPCC considers itself above all the petty governments of the world which means only completely defunding IPCC and CAGW malarkey is a step toward returning to science. National and international law enforcement should issue records protection orders and begin investigations. As a government funded entity, all records should be accessible to all. Immediately.

Anyone care to non-linearly extrapolate Railroad Bill’s looming 6th Assessment Report due for thrilling release in October 2018? Asymptotic or Exponential: That is the question! By then, these bootless hacks will have remanded AGW’s junk-science deadheads to hog-heaven’s Great Recycling Plant where they belong.

The IPCC is simply doing what is said it would do, what’s the big deal?”

I missed that IPCC statement where they said they’d lie, fabricate false language to spin their favorite fantasies, insist man’s influence is evil and eventually causes world disaster, edit out the good science put forward, and a number of additional unsavory actions.

Being as that is the IPCC actions in spinning a false summary, where and when did the IPCC actually state those intentions?

“The big deal is that the IPCC is wasting huge amounts of money our money.”
+++++++++++++
I am not sure what to make of your narrative. But I want to focus on the opening sentence of your last paragraph, which I put in quotes above. Personnally I don’t think “The” big deal is that they are wasting our money. The big deal is that they are “using” our money to “fabricate a false sense of urgency” for policy makers to make policy that leads to fewer humans being able to thrive. It’s the negative results from policy makers following the IPCC’s prescription that is the biggest deal.

Crispin in Waterloo but really in Vancouver: September 15, 2013 at 11:13 am brings up a very important observation.

To summarize:

AR4 published in 2007 stated that the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade.
AR4 said 90% confidence that AG emissions are responsible for most of the recent warming.

Leaked AR5 says the true figure since 1951 has been only 0.12C per decade – a rate far below even the lowest computer prediction.
AR5 says 95% confidence that AG emissions are responsible for more than half of recent warming.

I think you will find the 95% confidence level has risen despite the fact the temperatures haven’t, is at least partly because over time, those who doubt the certainty of it all tend to either leave, or refrain from contributing any more, meaning the average certainty of those within the organisation of the IPCC goes up over time.

The higher confidence level is largely a reflection of those left within the organisation who believe it the most strongly. This is partly how most social organisations tend to become more extreme over time, they simply become more populated by those who are more certain about the role and place of the organisation over time. One of the differences between social organisation and science.

“For a decade, Anote Tong the president has been warning the 100,000 inhabitants of the tiny Pacific state that they may not have much longer to cling to their 32 atolls. Now, he can talk about a potential solution.

Improbable though it may sound, with the help of a pioneering Japanese company and a few hundred billion dollars, Mr. Tong is considering the creation of the world’s first floating nation.”

Some Japanese firm wants obviously to sell Kiribati some design that we, taxpayers, are likely to fund thanks to the UN… Canada’s National Post did not made itself appear smarter by reprinting this Julian Ryall Telegraph story.

“Co-author Blair Feltmate, a climate-change specialist at the University of Waterloo, said the executives surveyed said the maps are essential for industry to price its products and for governments to plan how they will protect vulnerable communities.
“They see what climate change is causing and they’re paying for it now already through sewer backup coverage,” Feltmate said in an interview.
“We’re rapidly heading into the realm where certain areas of Canada may be uninsurable.”

Clearly Blair Feltmate is either incompetent or misleading: the 1979 Monenco report has made it clear about risks in the Calgary are of the Bow River.
CALGARY (June 1897)
Bow River rises about five metres turning downtown into a lake, washing out bridges, short-circuiting electricity and cutting Canadian Pacific’s line to Vancouver.
CALGARY (June 1915)
The Bow washes away Centre Street Bridge, nearly drowning two city officials. Sheep Creek floods Okotoks and cuts gas mains, leaving Calgarians without cooking fuel.
CALGARY (June 1923)
The Elbow River breaks the 1915 record by 20 centimetres when it rises to 2.9 metres. The Bow River, though it rises 1.5 metres above normal, is still about .6 metres under the 1915 record height.
CALGARY (June 1929)
Bow, Elbow and Highwood rivers overflow to submerge High River as well as southwest and northwest city districts under a metre of muddy water. It takes a heavy toll on zoo animals.
CALGARY (June 1932)
On June 1, 1932, Calgary receives 79.2 mm over a 24-hour period, just .6 mm less than the average rainfall for the whole month. The empty reservoir of the recently completed Glenmore Dam prevents major damage.

Thank you for the original quotes. It is as I was informed: the 95% confidence is for a different claim.

Re the other comment on “more than half” being technically similar to “most” it clearly is not, based on the context. The communicated message is that the portion of the warming we ’cause’ has changed substantially.

Many people consider the MWP to be around the period when the Vikings settled in Greenland (ie., circa 1000to 1400 AD). Mann correctly observes “Some of the most dramatic evidence for Medieval warmth has been argued to come from Iceland and Greenland (see Ogilvie, 1991). In Greenland, the Norse settlers, arriving around AD 1000, maintained a settlement, raising dairy cattle and sheep. Greenland existed, in effect, as a thriving European colony for several centuries.”

But it was also warm in Europe some 700 or so years earlier (ie., around 200/300AD). Again Mann correctly observes “It is evident that Europe experienced, on the whole, relatively mild climate conditions during the earliest centuries of the second millennium (i.e., the early Medieval period)….Geological evidence indicates that mountain glaciers throughout Europe retreated substantially at this time, relative to the glacial advances of later centuries (Grove and Switsur, 1994).” There is in fact strong archaelogical evidence that glaciers in Norther Europe circa 200 to 300AD were less advanced than they are today. For example see this article regarding a find of clothing which confirms that glaciers in this region of Norway were less advanced than todayhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2408825/Melting-ice-reveals-1-700-year-old-woolly-jumper–experts-say-come.html

So we know that there were warm periods in the Northern Hemisphere around the time of the Minoans, the Romans, the early Medieval period, the Medieval period. There is also some evidence (but not conclusive) of a warm period during the height of the Egyptian civilisation. All of these warm periods were warmer than today, and were times of plenty when life flourished in the benovalent climate conditions that then prevailed. Given that they were definitely not caused by CO2, they all need to be explained before one can even begin to get a prima facie case of AGW off the ground.

So there have been many warm periods in Europe/the Northern Hemishpere (in addition to the Holocene Optimum). We do not know what caused those warm periods, nor what mechanism could give rise to warm periods covering an extending period of time but pertaining only to a small (or relatively small) geographical area. Given the sparsity of Southern Hemisphere data we are unable to assess whether or not that these warm periods extended into the Southern Hemisphere and of course the matter is further complicated by the dampened Southern Hemisphere response brought about by the greater oceanic area in that half of the globe. Even today, the Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern Hemisphere so this is entirely consistent with what we know as fact about the earlier warming periods experienced in the Northern Hemisphere these last 4.5 thousand years (or so).

Further to my post above, the final paragraph was missed off. It reads:

So are we seeing anything unusual in the late 19th/20th century? At any rate as far as the Northern hemisphere, the answer to that must be NO. There have been many instances when the Northern Hemishpere has been as warmer or warmer than today. Until those periods can be adequately explained and until one can demonstarte that what caused those periods to be warm is not operative today, there can be no valid strong confidence in AGW. Professor Curry is right given that the ‘pause’ in temperature rise was not predicted, runs contrary to the CO2 GHE theory, and until such time as this event is adequately explained by an explanation consistent with AGW GHE theory, there cannot truly be more confidence in the theory and the claim that the latter half of the 20th century was predominantly caused by man, than the confidence level expressed in AR4. Infact logic dictates, there must in truth be less certainty in that claim, not more, and the IPCC will look ridiculous if it publishes AR5 with a claim of even greater certainty than that expressed in AR4.

George Steiner says:
September 15, 2013 at 7:44 pm
Pause implies that it is temporary. My question concerned the implication that the PAUSE is temporary. So what is the evidence that it is temporary?

The ‘evidence’ of the pause is seen simply in the WUWT post of Sept 9th, about Syan Akasofu’s paper – which in simple terms shows the likely recovery from the LIA, with a superimposed natural multidecadal oscillation on top.
If one believes that palaeo proxies are reasonably accurate, based on the last few ice ages – we are possibly at or very near the top of the interglacial warm period AND nearly at the end of said period.
The pause relates to the ‘belief’ that the underlying LIA recovery is not complete (which it may well be?) and the fact that the natural oscillation is on a downward swing – and it will presumably follow into its upward swing sometime soon – hence a pause, rather than a complete halt.
If we are actually at the end of the interglacial (warm period) then of course temps may never rise as per the last 150 years again! But we cannot know this until it stops and we have another several decades of data going into the next ice age! Of course, this is something the warmists will never admit too!

Politics is about weasel words. Ever heard a politicians admit they were wrong?

Science is about clear concise statements. Not declarative statements of fact (if none are present), but clear statements of the situation as it is known.

That the IPCC needs a translation clearly indicates that the document is not about science, but politics. Which again is not surprising. The IPCC is a political animal that is in danger of losing its cause for existence, and so like any threatened animal, it is using every arrow in its quiver to justify its existence and continued funding.

2007: 90% confidence that most of 0.2 deg was from AG CO2 and other forcing contributions
2013: 95% confidence that at least 0.05 deg was from that cause.

This is obviously an escape clause. All we have to do is watch for ‘interpretations’ of the weasel’s words. Apparently it was not enough to predict hot/cold/dry/wet/desert/flood/hurricanes/tornados and mass starvation in the midst of plenty (of fluxed up evidence).

As the lowering of the sensitivity was about 50% (with waffling) there is, in ‘climate science terms’ a correlation between the overall drop in probable cause and the probable effect. This opens a new door to claim that AR5 authors knew all along that the impact of AG emissions is low and not dangerous, why is everyone so excited about it?

code tech you are damn right! This is going to be trench warfare. Vimy Ridge and the Somme, speaking metaphorically, of course! I can tell you I’d have the same difficulty, for example, explaining even to skeptics here on this blog,that the fluoride in our water is an accumulating biotoxin and should not be in anyones’ water. I’m sure I would be attacked as a John bircher, if I suggested that everyone who thinks fluoride in our children’s water is ok still has a stupidity problem even if they have the climate issue right! If stupidity is too strong a word, how about a Matrix problem of being unconscious in the world? Thanks to the Israeli Supreme Court for making the US one of only 7 countries ( all English- speaking, curiously enough!) criminally arrogant enough to medicate or poison its population without consent with fluoride and the other dangerous compounds like lead and cadmium etc that come with it, which is what the Israeli high Court said in so many words.. Fluoride was introduced to the world scene at Dachau and used to confuse and disorient enemies. We deserve our fate, but should our children pay for our ignorance and crimnal smugness?

The climate models can’t predict the past. So why would you think they can predict the future?
Besides, nobody can agree on the past…wait, nobody can agree on the present. Ok, so let’s see of we can agree on now. When we can agree on now, then let’s attempt to agree on the recent past.

Julia says:
September 15, 2013 at 5:30 pm
I do hope we can stop global warming because it gets worse, but how bad is it now?
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when you go on vacation, do you tend to go to warmer places or colder?